To follow-up on our open letter in the previous episode, we’re happy to announce the show is back on track and doing well! However, based on the suggestion of several listeners, FTB will now be released on Wednesdays instead of Mondays.

Continuing our game design series, we spend most of this episode talking about the role player-characters will assume in your game. We also talk about Christmas parties and our current contests, as well as giving a Skies of Glass Q&A.

One of our forum users, Crafterofcode, sent us a box of Australian candies. We spend this bonus episode sampling the candy and discussing international food.

We also bring Tex back via Skype, since he spent several years living in Europe. This was a great opportunity for us to test recording with Skype, which is something we may use for interviews in the future.

Before the bonus episode itself, I take a few minutes to address the listeners with an open letter we posted on our forums. It explains why the design series has been running behind and what we’re doing to address the problem.

Our Xbox Live contest continues for another week. Don’t forget to enter again, using the “Contest Entry Form” link at the top of our site. Also, we forgot to mention it during the episode, but we’ve made a slight change to the rules. We realize Christmas time is drawing near, so if you don’t have a Gamer Tag, but you intend to give this game as a gift to someone that will actually use it, you can still enter and win any of the prizes. We just want your word that this is going (for free) to someone that will play it.

During the episode, we mention a document share we’re using on Google. If you want to set up one for your own project, you can find it here: docs.google.com.

Our first major topic of advice relates to forming a solid team to develop your roleplaying game. We then move on to talk about the importance of feel, which will guide your development of setting and rules.

We recorded this episode immediately after watching the two Dungeons & Dragons movies. We spend the first half of the episode reviewing those two films before we broaden the topic to talk about RPG movies in general. We toss out some games we’d like to see made into movies and theorize about why there haven’t been more.

We were joined this episode by Tony from Fanboy Smackdown. If you’re interested in hearing his all-movie podcast, you can find it at http://www.fanboysmackdown.com.

We start this episode with a bad player habit that we missed in our previous two shows. After that, we take on a series of topics related to character creation: unlisted perks and penalties, restricting races and classes, obscure supplements that can wreck games, and player illustrations.

This is normally a pretty light-hearted show, however, not everything in life is a joke.

Heart disease is the number one killer in the developed world, and we at FTB want to do our part to help. We would like to release the following PSA that has a simple — yet important — test you can use to determine your risk of heart disease.